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Comment by hardtke | Hacker News Reader

This could be the nail in the coffin for Apple with regards to Spotify's antitrust complaint in Europe.

Spotify reportedly got the same deal.

Spotify hasn’t allowed in app purchases for years.

Spotify’s complaint was that Apple gave Apple Music special treatment when it came to its platform like how Siri integrates with it and how it was Spotify couldn’t stream directly over the Apple Watch.

Apple opened up both to third parties over a year ago - and Spotify supports neither.

Spotify supports siri. "Play AC/DC on Spotify" works just fine.

That's very new. Until recently all you got was an excuse that it doesn't work and a suggestion to use Apple Music instead. It doesn't work on my HomePod yet.

HomePod support for third party music services was just announced this year.

That’s very recent...and still no standalone Watch support at least as of April.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/iOS-iPhone-iPad/Apple-Watch...

Spotify’s Apple Watch app terrible because Spotify wants it’s that way. Other music streaming apps did build really good Apple Watch apps already[1].

I believe that Spotify just don’t want to integrate well with the system so that they can use it as a leverage.

[1]: https://9to5mac.com/2020/04/29/pandora-shows-spotify-how-to-...

That's because of iOS was never good at inter app communication (Android's version of intents) and that made Siri a worse experience for users and ultimately doomed it in the assistant wars.

I don't think Apple management sat down and thought, right, how do we kneecap competing music streaming providers? Okay lets build Apple Music support for Siri but not Spotify.

It was just that no iOS apps had deep Siri integration and they've been one-offing implementations for common usecases like timers, alarms etc. for the longest time. I assume someone got a project funded by the Music org to go one off the Apple Music usecase as well and here we are.

Someone just posted that Spotify does work with Siri on the iPhone and Siri on the watch uses the same system so that kind of throws the argument that Siri doesn’t support it out the Window.

Apple also has been adding third party intents for years.

With Shortcuts users can add their own Siri actions and third party apps can exposes programming actions.

Yes - the historical context was my point. Things are fine now, Spotify gets the same capabilities as Apple music, so there's no issue.

The thing they (Spotify) are complaining about now with the EU antitrust case is the 30% gate keeping toll Apple charges which is an entirely different thing.

Spotify doesn’t allow in app purchases. So Apple isn’t getting any cut.

Spotify complained that Apple wouldn’t allow them on the watch. But they still aren’t taking advantage of it even though Pandora has.

But "Play AC/DC" plays them in Apple Music, not your preferred (or currently used) music player app.

There is no way to set that I prefer Spotify, and I've seen a few occasions when CarPlay showed Apple Music when I started a car (might be related to not having Spotify app in the background, but I never digged deeper).

This also came up yesterday in the antitrust hearing, wrgt Alexa and Amazon Basics defaulting.

For comparison, both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant allow you to specify different default music services from their own offerings.

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